Steve Best & Douglas Kellner

Abstract:The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves
conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this essay, we articulate
the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue against
one-sided positions which dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in
favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a
politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served
by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the modern and postmodern
traditions. Developing a new politics involves overcoming the limitations of
certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics in order to
develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the
coming millennium.

"What's going on just now?
What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment
in which we are living?" Michel Foucault

In the past two decades, the
foundational claims of modern politics have been challenged by postmodern
perspectives. The grand visions of emancipation in liberalism, Marxism, and
other political perspectives of the modern era have been deemed excessively
grandiose and totalizing, occluding differences and neglecting more specific
oppressions of individuals and disparate groups. The liberal project of
providing universal rights and freedoms for all has been challenged by specific
groups struggling for their own rights, advancing their own specific interests,
and championing the construction of their unique cultures and identities. The
Marxian project of revolution, worldwide and global in scope, has been replaced
in some quarters by more localized struggles and more modest and reformist
goals. The result is a variety of new forms of postmodern politics whose
discourses, practices, and effects are beginning to register and come under
critical scrutiny.

The contemporary world is
undergoing major transformations in science, technology, economics, culture, and
everyday life. This "great transformation" (Polyani), comparable in scope to the
changes produced by the industrial revolution, is moving toward a postindustrial,
infotainment, and biotech mode of global capitalism, organized around new
information, computer, communications, and genetic technologies. Scientific and
technological revolution are key elements of the global restructuring of
capitalism, which includes the growth of far-reaching transnational
corporations; intensified competition on a planetary scale; moving industry and
manufacturing to the developing world, while investment flows into the
overdeveloped world; heightened exploitation; corporate downsizing; and greater
levels of unemployment, inequality, and insecurity. Yet the
scientific-technological-economic revolutions of our time also involve the
advent of novel forms of labor, politics, culture, and everyday life which
contain new economic opportunities, openings for political transformation, and a
wealth of innovative products and technologies which might improve the human
condition.

Hence, the present conjuncture is
highly ambiguous, positioning those in the overdeveloped Western and Northern
areas between the era of modernity and a new epoch for which the term
postmodernity has been coined. At the same time, people in other parts of the
world are still living in premodern social and cultural forms, and on the whole
the developing world exists in a contradictory matrix of premodern, modern, and
postmodern forms. The rapid transformation of the world generates new dangers
such as the potential loss of the modern traditions of humanism, the
Enlightenment, and radical social movements, as well as innovative
possibilities, such as emerge from new technologies, new identities, and new
political struggles. The old theories, concepts, modes of thought and analysis,
will only go so far in theorizing, analyzing, and mapping the emerging
constellations, thus requiring novel modes of thought, strategies, discourses,
and practices.[1]

Indeed, the contemporary terrain
shows a mutation in political thought and practice that parallels and is
informed by changes in theory. For us, the concept of the "postmodern" serves as
a marker to highlight the new, to call attention to discontinuities and
ruptures, and to signal that an extensive range of novelties are appearing which
require fresh analyses, theories, and practices. But for the postmodern to have
theoretical and political gravity, it must be linked with the tumultuous
metamorphoses of the day and given concrete substance and force.[2]

From Modern to Postmodern Politics

Today the revolutionary project
stands accused before the tribunal of history ―
accused of having failed, of having engendered a new alienation. This
amounts to recognizing that the ruling society has proved capable of
defending itself, on all levels of reality, much better than revolutionaries
expected. Not that it has become more tolerable. Revolution has to be
reinvented, that's all. Internationale situationniste #6
(August 1991)

As capitalism was undergoing
dramatic socio-economic, scientific, and technological changes, a paradigm shift
was underway in the realms of theory, the arts, science, and culture at large.
By the 1980s, there were intense polemics over the importance of the postmodern
turn, with some celebrating postmodern discourse and culture as an advance over
moribund modern forms, while others attacked postmodern theory and artifacts as
degenerate and regressive. Many, especially the older generation, went on with
business as usual, ignoring the massive changes taking place and the
controversies over their significance.

In the realm of theory, the
postmodern turn consists of a movement away from the mechanistic and
positivistic worldview of modern science, along with a repudiation of
Enlightenment optimism, faith in reason, and emphasis on transcultural values
and human nature. Postmodernists typically reject foundationalism and
transcendental subjectivities within theory, mechanism and positivism in
science, the modernist emphases on innovation and originality in art. With the
belief that modern theories and politics have become reductive, illusory, and
arrogant, various postmodern theorists, artists, and activists emphasize
counter-values of multiplicity and difference, anti-realism, aesthetic irony and
appropriation, ecological perspectives, and a proliferation of competing forms
of politics.

As with postmodern theory, there is
no one "postmodern politics," but rather a conflicting set of positions that
emerges from the ambiguities of social change and multiple postmodern
theoretical perspectives. Yet the different categories of postmodern politics
are not merely conceptual distinctions, but are actual political tendencies
played out in the public sphere, in the universities, in the workplace, and in
everyday life. Thus, as new technologies transform every aspect of life, as
culture plays a more crucial role in domains from the economy to personal
identity, and as capital creates a new global economy and new syntheses of the
global and the local abound, politics too takes on new forms and content.

Generally characterized, the
project of modern politics was to define and implement universal goals like
freedom, equality, and justice, in an attempt to transform institutional
structures of domination. Modern politics emerged from the Enlightenment project
of subjecting to critique by the new norms of reason all forms of authority and
all existing institutions. Modern politics presupposed a democratic public
sphere where individuals and social groups could discuss political problems and
choices, and intervene practically in public affairs. The modern political
project involved attempts to discern basic human rights, the common good and
universal values, and to provide institutional guarantees that allow democratic
rights, discussion, and consensus.

Thus, the American Revolution
declared the universal rights of "all people" to be "self-evident truths" as
revealed by the light of Reason. The French Revolution championed the universal
"Rights of Man" on the basis of liberté, egalité, fraternité and shortly
thereafter Mary Wollstonecraft published a treatise Vindication of the Rights
of Women.[3] Attempting
to realize these universal appeals beyond the limiting context of bourgeois
class relations, Marx urged that the "Workers of the World Unite!" to create an
international politics of solidarity designed to overthrow bourgeois property
forms. In the Americas and then in Africa, Asia, and throughout the non-Western
world, national liberation movements emerged which challenged colonialism and
sought to bring the promises of modern democracy and liberty to areas of the
world sunk in oppression. Simon Bolivar's struggles for Latin American freedom,
the slave revolts of the Caribbean, and Jose Marti's vision of Nuestra
America, free of colonial domination, articulated the yearnings unleashed by
the modern project and attempts to realize its promises, where later liberation
movements claimed that only socialism can redeem the sufferings of the "wretched
of the earth" and realize the promises of modernity.

Yet the promises and yearnings of
modernity and modern politics were seldom realized. Workers were exploited
throughout the modern epoch by rapacious capital; women were only able to gain
full democratic rights by the early decades of the 20th century and continued to
suffer patriarchal domination; people of color were systematically discriminated
against by the forces of racism; and the developing countries continued to be
oppressed by the imperialist powers. Despite war, poverty, hunger, economic
depression, and fierce forms of subjugation and suffering, modern politics was
optimistic in its outlook; indeed, it was often religious in its teleological
faith that the progressive logic of history would soon be realized.
Enlightenment faith in a better future inspired liberalism and Marxism alike.
Thus, modern politics was informed by strong normative values and utopian
visions of a world of universal freedom, equality, and harmony.

A postmodern politics began to take
shape during the 1960s with the appearance of numerous new political groups and
struggles. The development of a postmodern politics is strongly informed by the
vicissitudes of social movements in France, the United States, and elsewhere, as
well as by emerging postmodern theories. The utopian visions of modern politics
proved, in this context, difficult to sustain and were either rejected in favor
of cynicism, nihilism, and, in some cases, a turn to the right, or were
dramatically recast and scaled down to more "modest" (non-systemic,
non-revolutionary) proportions. The modern emphasis on collective struggle,
solidarity, and alliance politics gave way to extreme fragmentation, as the
"movement" of the 1960s splintered into various competing struggles for rights
and liberties. The previous emphasis on transforming the public sphere and
institutions of domination gave way to new emphases on culture, personal
identity, and everyday life, as macropolitics were replaced by the micropolitics
of local transformation and changes in subjectivity.

In the aftermath of the 1960s,
novel and conflicting conceptions of postmodern politics emerged. Postmodern
politics thus take a variety of forms and would include the anti-politics of
Baudrillard and his followers, who exhibit a cynical, despairing rejection of
the belief in emancipatory social transformation, as well as a variety of
efforts to create a new or reconstructed politics. On the extreme and apolitical
position of a Baudrillard, we are stranded at the end of history, paralyzed and
frozen, as the masses collapse into inertia and indifference, and media
simulations and technology triumph over agency. Thus, from Baudrillard's
perspective, all we can do is "accommodate ourselves to the time left to us."[4]

The flip-side of a negative and
nihilistic postmodern politics is an affirmative postmodern politics. Such
positive postmodern positions range from an apolitical New Age life-style
postmodernism to a self-conscious oppositional postmodernism, a postmodernism of
resistance.[5] New
Age postmodernism is largely a form of apolitical individualism that emphasizes
transformation of life-style and values, while eschewing traditional politics.
New Age spirituality is a kind of pop postmodernism that envisions a "new age"
of spirituality that overcomes the excesses of capitalist materialism and
consumerism in favor of God, the soul, and the body, while blending together
numerous philosophies and traditions in a potpourri marketable to all tastes.

Another form of affirmative
postmodern politics also rejects traditional modern politics and attempts at
large-scale social transformation in favor of piecemeal reforms and local
strategies. This is the position of Foucault, Lyotard, and Rorty, all of whom
reject a global politics of systemic change in favor of modifications at the
local level designed to enhance individual freedom and progressive change.
Foucault and Lyotard reject utopian thought and the category of "totality" as
terroristic, while searching for new "styles" of life "as different as possible
from each other" (Foucault) and a proliferation of "language games" in
"agonistic" opposition to one another (Lyotard). Rorty merely ―
and meekly ―
seeks "new descriptions" of reality that pluralize the voices in the social
"conversation," as he replaces normative critique with "irony" and retires
philosophy to a limited role in private life. This form of postmodern politics,
consequently, is but a refurbished liberal reformism that fails to break with
the logic of bourgeois individualism and undermines attempts to construct bold
visions of a new reality to be shaped by a more radical and ambitious politics
of alliance and solidarity.

Reconstructive postmodernism
attempts to combine modern and postmodern politics. More extreme negative and
affirmative postmodern approaches involve a decisive break and rejection of
modern politics, calling for a radical discontinuity and dramatically different
politics. This ranges from negative and cynical postmodernism that rejects all
politics and action for a stance of negativism, defeatism, and nihilism, to New
Age emphasis on lifestyle and the transformation of subjectivity, to a
postmodern politics rooted in the struggles of new social movements and
developments in postmodern theory. Such a form of reconstructive postmodern
politics, however, advanced by Laclau and Mouffe, among others, stakes out a
position between the modern and postmodern, in order to use postmodern critiques
of essentialism, reductionism, and foundationalism to reconstruct Enlightenment
values and socialist politics through a logic of contingency and plurality.[6] Rejecting
the Marxist reduction of emancipatory politics to class struggle that privileges
the working class, Laclau and Mouffe embrace the new social movements of the
1970s and 1980s as multiple sources of progressive change which can bring about
"radical democracy."

Finally, there is another mode of
affirmative postmodern politics, perhaps the dominant form of politics today,
known as "identity politics" that often has emancipatory aspirations but which
usually falls short of advancing systemic change and new forms of radical
struggle. "Identity politics" refers to a politics in which individuals
construct their cultural and political consciousness through engaging in
struggles or associations that advance the interests of the groups with which
they associate. Sometimes identification is concrete, based on participatory
involvement in specific groups, while sometimes it is more imaginary and
abstract in nature, as one identifies, for example, with the black, gay and
lesbian, or with whatever community from which one gains their identity and
sense of self and belonging.

Identity politics has its origins
in the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s and, ultimately, the
struggles of the 1960s. Yet the "movement" of the '60s both pursued a coalition
and alliance politics and challenged the dominant powers on multiple
levels ―
gender, race, the hierarchical structure of the universities, colonial
domination, U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, the alienated nature of work, sexual
repression, and the oppressive organization of everyday life. In the 1970s,
however, the "movement" fragmented into the "new social movements" which
included feminist, black liberation, gay and lesbian, and peace and
environmental groups, each fighting for their own interests (e.g., blacks saw
the emerging environmental movement in the late 1960s as a bourgeois diversion
from civil rights struggles, and environmentalists emphasized wilderness issues
while ignoring problems of urban pollution). By the 1980s and 1990s, as the
Balkanization process continued, the new social movements had become transformed
into "identity politics," the very name suggesting a turn away from general
social, political, and economic issues toward concerns with culture and
subjectivity.

Identity politics bears the
influence of postmodern theory, which is evident in the critique of modern
reductionism, abstract universalism, and essentialism, as well as a use of
multiperspectival strategies that legitimate multiple political voices.
Foucault's genealogical politics, for example, is explicitly designed to
liberate suppressed voices and struggles in history from the dominant narratives
that reduce them to silence. In identity politics, individuals define themselves
primarily as belonging to a given group, marked as "oppressed" and therefore as
outside the dominant white male, heterosexual, capitalist culture. These
identities revolve around a "subject position," a key identity marker defined by
one's gender, race, class, sexual preference, and so on, through which an
individual is made subordinate to the dominant culture. Although class is
certainly a major form of identity, identity politics typically is defined in
opposition to class politics.

But while postmodern theory usually
attacks essentialism, there is a form of essentialism in many modes of identity
politics which privilege gender, race, sexual preference, or some other marker
as the constituent of identity. Moreover, through fetishizing a single
all-defining personal identity (woman, black, chicano, gay, etc.), identity
politics also departs from the insight of postmodern theory that identities are
multiple and socially constructed, and that they need to be reconstructed in an
emancipatory, autonomous, and self-affirming fashion. In other words, some
versions of identity politics fetishize given constituents of identity, as if
one of our multiple identity markers were our deep and true self, around which
all of our life and politics revolve.

In some forms, identity politics
dovetails with liberal interest group politics that seeks to advance the
interests of a specific group, typically in opposition not only to the dominant
groups, but also to other marginalized and oppressed groups. Thus, in contrast
to the universal and collective emphases of modern politics, a postmodern
identity politics tends to be insular and something of a special interest group,
perhaps itself a postmodern phenomenon. Hence, whereas modern politics focused
on universal goals like gaining civil liberties, reducing inequalities, or
transforming structures and institutions of domination, postmodern identity
politics singles out the specific interests of a group and constructs identities
through identification with the group and its struggles.

Of course, critics of modern
politics have indicated from the beginning that the universal claims of modern
theorists and politicians were cloaks for advancing the particular interests of
ruling groups, mainly white male property owners. The cardinal rights advanced
by the bourgeois revolutions in the United States, France, and elsewhere were
those of property rights which granted supreme economic and political power to
white male capitalists in flagrant contradiction to their democratic rhetoric.
Yet the new universal ideology of modern politics unleashed a power that the
ruling classes could not restrain; it inspired and legitimated the struggles of
the very groups it was used to suppress, including those advocating identity
politics today, who denounce universal appeals as inherently ideological and
oppressive.

Yet classical Marxism also advanced
a reductionist and essentialist view of politics that is repudiated by
postmodern politics. Marx theorized labor as a "universal class" which by
emancipating itself will emancipate all other oppressed groups. On Marx's
scheme, subjectivity is constituted as a class identity and all social
antagonisms devolve around production as the essence of the social. Later
Marxists continued with this policy, subsuming other key social issues to the
"woman question," "race question," "national question," and so on, failing to
see how race, gender, nationality, and other forms of identity were crucial and
often more directly relevant for many different groups of people, just as
nationalism proved a far more powerful identity than did international workers'
solidarity for various European workers during the first World War.

Yet Marxist politics was not
effectively displaced as the dominant radical political discourse and movement
until the 1960s, with the explosion of new struggles and identities that
fundamentally contested advanced capitalist society. Identity politics as it is
defined today departs ―
explicitly or implicitly ―
from a critique of Marxist politics. The break from the essentialist and
reductionist logic informing certain Marxist conceptions of class struggle has
had liberating effects in the political field. It allowed for new conceptions of
micropolitics, pluralist democracy, and a politicization of the multiple ways in
which the subject is constituted across numerous institutional sites and in
everyday life. Yet there are also problematic elements in extreme postmodern
rejections of some classical positions within modern politics.

Contributions and Limitations of
Postmodern Politics

"Dialectical thought has meant
the most advanced state of knowledge, and it is only from this, in the last
analysis, that decisive action can come." Max Horkheimer

One of the key insights of the
postmodern turn, theorized by Foucault, was that power is everywhere, not only
in the factories, but in the schools, prisons, hospitals, and all other
institutions. This insight is both depressing, since it acknowledges that power
saturates all social spaces and relations, and exhilarating, because it allows
for and demands new forms of struggle. Hence, multiple forms of resistance open
up along every line of identity that is controlled or normalized. The movements
of the period challenged capitalism, state power and bureaucracy, the repressive
organization of everyday life in the midst of consumer society, along with
various modes of ideologically constituted identities.

Postmodern politics, following
capital and state intervention processes themselves, represents a politicization
of all spheres of social and personal existence, which were previously ignored
or rejected by modern and Marxist approaches as proper political spaces. With
postmodern politics, every sphere of social life becomes subject to questioning
and contestation, and the sites of struggle multiply. With the pluralistic
approach, power is more vulnerable to attack and hence Foucault emphasized the
contingency and frailty of power relations. Where a Leninist would argue that
pluralized struggle only dissipates the centralized forces needed to combat
capital and the state, a politically radical postmodernist would respond that
the new struggles attack the weak links of the system and spread resistance
everywhere, thereby allowing for the general attack that Leninists rightly think
is necessary for overthrowing capitalism.

Hence, the 1960s brought a shift
from a macropolitics that focused on changing the structure of the economy and
state to a micropolitics that aims to overturn power and hierarchy in specific
institutions, and to liberate emotional, libidinal, and creative energies
repressed by the reality principle of bourgeois society. An important aspect of
micropolitics, as evident in the work of Lyotard, Foucault, and Deleuze and
Guattari, is a politics of subjectivity which theorizes the conditions under
which the modern subject has emerged as both an effect of power, what Foucault
calls the "subjectification" of individuals. This entails primarily a struggle
against the "microfascism" latent in everyone, to be combatted by breaking out
of, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, the "molar" pole of desire (such as
informs all normalized subjectivities) and finding the "molecular" lines of
escape. For Foucault, the politics of subjectivity involves a "politics as
ethics" which creates new subjects on the Greek model of an "aesthetics of
existence."[7]

Postmodern models of politics
attempt to redefine the "political" based on changes in society, technology,
economics, and everyday life. A postmodern cultural politics, building on
the insights of Gramsci, the surrealists, Lefebvre, and the situationists,
thematizes culture as a crucial terrain of power and struggle. To the extent
that social reproduction is now largely achieved at the levels of culture and
everyday life, where the individual is a target of total administration,
questions of subjectivity, ideology, culture, aesthetics, and utopian thought
take on a new importance. The instrumentalist, pragmatic, or rationalist
conception of political struggle, which attempts to shape "political
consciousness," class or otherwise, and mobilize political insight into a
political movement that transcends questions of culture, is insufficient because
it begs the question of how a political movement will be possible in the first
place, given the degree of subjective identification with dominant modes of
thought and behavior throughout society. As thinkers like Reich and Adorno saw,
fascism has roots not only in the crisis of monopoly capital, but also in the
repression of the instinctual structure and the emergence of an "authoritarian
personality."

Thus, if people live immersed in a
culture colonized by capitalism, a culture of spectacles that binds affect and
mobilizes pleasures to its sights, sound, and experiences, then the struggle for
culture, subjectivity, and identity is no longer secondary to the struggle for
society, and both cultural and identity politics are crucial for breaking from
the dominant ideologies and creating new forms of life and consciousness. Given
the need to produce new subjectivities, political education, rational
persuasion, and moral appeals remain of the greatest importance, but they can be
very weak opponents of the seductive pleasures of MTV, blockbuster films, the
Internet, fashion and advertising, and commodity consumption of all kinds. In
Marcuse's words, "no persuasion, no theory, no reasoning can break this prison
[of subjectivity], unless the fixed, petrified sensibility of the
individuals is `dissolved, 'opened to a new dimension in history, until
the oppressive familiarity with the given object world is broken - broken in a
second alienation: that from the alienated society."[8]

It is culture that molds the
sensibilities and thus a radical cultural politics attempts to undo the
enculturation of the dominant culture by providing new ways of seeing, feeling,
thinking, talking, and being. Progressives today must not simply fall back on
the old valorization of critical realism and its narrow cognitive models, as
valuable as didactic and pedagogical art might be. What is ultimately needed are
new affective structures and modes of experience which can act as catalysts and
the condition of the possibility of broader social and political
transformations. Here, the political function of critical art becomes,
negatively, a defamiliarization from the dominant mode of experiencing
reality, what Marcuse has termed an alienation from alienation. Such has been
the practice of Brecht's epic theater, Artaud's theater of cruelty, or Godard's
anti-narrative films, all of which sought to question and displace the dominant
mode of experiencing reality, rather than reproduce it through staid aesthetic
conventions. Positively, a cultural politics has the task of "aesthetic
education," the reshaping of human needs, desires, senses, and imagination
through the construction of images, spectacles, and narratives that prefigure
different ways of seeing and living.

Situationist art, for example,
practiced both functions, the negative through its deconstruction of
advertisements and other images (detournement), and the positive through
experiences with the "constructed situation," a practice earlier advanced by the
surrealists in their various exercises and games (such as "the exquisite
corpse") designed to liberate creative forces. Paradoxically, today we find the
atrophy of the senses in their hypertrophic extension throughout the sensorium
of the spectacle and its images and commodity empires.[9]Against Lukŕcs, we
emphasize the importance of formal innovation and avant-gardism in the arts,
where such new techniques and modes of vision can help people break with
repressive identifications with both the utilitarian (instrumental reason) and
affective (sign value) modes of experience constituted by advanced capitalism. A
new society will never be attainable until it is experienced as a need, as a
desire for new modes of community, work, experience, social interaction, and
relations to the natural world that could never be satisfied within capitalism
and therefore cannot be coopted by economic reforms.

As Bahro saw, capitalism generates
needs and desires it ultimately cannot satisfy for freedom, justice,
self-realization, and a good life, and a radical cultural politics will depict
both how the current mode of social organization restricts, limits, and deforms
desire, freedom, and justice, while projecting visions of how these aspirations
could be realized.[10] Both
the radical negations of society by certain forms of critical modernism (i.e.
Kafka, Beckett, German Expressionism, etc.) and the utopian dimension of art
stressed by theorists such as Bloch and Marcuse is thus more relevant than ever
today when radical critique is needed to free individuals from forms of
oppression of which they are often unaware and when a better way of life is
technically possible for all.

The emphasis on local struggles and
micropower, cultural politics which redefine the political, and attempts to
develop political forms relevant to the problems and developments of the
contemporary age is extremely valuable, but there are also key limitations to
the dominant forms of postmodern politics. While an emphasis on micropolitics
and local struggles can be a healthy substitute for excessively utopian and
ambitious political projects, one should not lose sight that core sources of
political power and oppression are precisely the big targets aimed at by modern
theory, including capital, the state, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy.
Taking on such major targets involves coalitions and multifront struggle, often
requiring a politics of alliance and solidarity that cuts across group
identifications to mobilize sufficient power to struggle against, say, the evils
of capitalism or the state.

Thus, while today we need the
expansion of localized cultural practices, they attain their real significance
only within the struggle for the transformation of society as a whole.
Without this systemic emphasis, cultural and identity politics remain confined
to the margins of society and are in danger of degenerating into narcissism,
hedonism, aestheticism, or personal therapy, where they pose no danger and are
immediately coopted by the culture industries. In such cases, the political
is merely the personal, and the original intentions of the 1960s goal to
broaden the political field are inverted and perverted. Just as economic and
political demands have their referent in subjectivity in everyday life, so these
cultural and existential issues find their ultimate meaning in the demand for a
new society and mode of production.

Yet we would insist that it is not
a question of micro vs macropolitics, as if it were an either/or proposition,
but rather both dimensions are important for the struggles of the present and
future.[11] Likewise,
we would argue that we need to combine the most affirmative and negative
perspectives, embodying Marcuse's declaration that critical social theory should
be both more negative and utopian in reference to the status quo.[12] There
are certainly many things to be depressed about is in the negative and cynical
postmodernism of a Baudrillard, yet without a positive political vision merely
citing the negative might lead to apathy and depression that only benefits the
existing order. For a dialectical politics, however, positive vision of what
could be is articulated in conjunction with critical analysis of what is in a
multiperspectivist approach that focuses on the forces of domination as well as
possibilities of emancipation.

But it is also a mistake, we
believe, to ground one's politics in either modern or postmodern theory alone.
Against one-sided positions, we advocate a version of reconstructive
postmodernism that we call a politics of alliance and solidarity that builds on
both modern and postmodern traditions. Unlike Laclau and Mouffe who believe that
postmodern theory basically provides a basis for a new politics, and who tend to
reject the Enlightenment per se, we believe that the Enlightenment continues to
provide resources for political struggle today and are skeptical whether
postmodern theory alone can provide sufficient assets for an emancipatory new
politics. Yet the Enlightenment has its blindspots and dark sides (such as its
relentless pursuit of the domination of nature, and naive belief in "progress,"
so we believe that aspects of the postmodern critique of Enlightenment are valid
and force us to rethink and reconstruct Enlightenment philosophy for the present
age. And while we agree with Habermas that a reconstruction of the Enlightenment
and modernity are in order, unlike Habermas we believe that postmodern theory
has important contributions to make to this project.

Various forms of postmodern
politics have been liberatory in breaking away from the abstract and ideological
universalism of the Enlightenment and the reductionist class politics of
Marxism, but they tend to be insular and fragmenting, focusing solely on the
experiences and political issues of a given group, even splintering further into
distinct subgroups such as divide the feminist community. Identity politics are
often structured around simplistic binary oppositions such as Us vs. Them and
Good vs. Bad that pit people against one another, making alliances, consensus,
and compromise difficult or impossible. This has been the case, for example,
with tendencies within radical feminism and ecofeminism which reproduce
essentialism by stigmatizing men and "male rationality" while exalting women as
the bearers of peaceful and loving value and as being "closer to nature."[13] Elements
in the black nationalist liberation movement in the 1960s and the early politics
of Malcolm X were exclusionist and racist, literally demonizing white people as
an evil and inferior race. Similarly, the sexual politics of some gay and
lesbian groups tend to exclusively focus on their own interests, while the
mainstream environmental movement is notorious for resisting alliances with
people of color and grass roots movements.[14]

Even though each group needs to
assert their identity as aggressively as possible, postmodern identity politics
should avoid falling into seriality and sheer fragmentation. These struggles,
though independent of one another, should be articulated within counterhegemonic
alliances, and attack power formations on both the micro- and macro-levels. Not
all universal appeals are ideological in the sense criticized by Marx; there are common grounds of experience, common concerns, and common forms of
oppression that different groups share which should be articulated -- concerns
such as the degradation of the environment and common forms of oppression that
stem from capitalist exploitation and alienated labor.

The New Political Terrain

"Thought in contradiction must
become more negative and more utopian in opposition to the status quo."
Herbert Marcuse.

To overcome alienation and
oppression, the implementation of radical democracy is proposed by a variety of
tendencies within postmodern theory. In modern democratic theory, the notion of
representative democracy superseded in liberal capitalist societies the stronger
forms of participatory democracy advocated by the Greeks and modern theorists
like Rousseau, Bakunin, and Marx. The postmodern political turn, then, involves
a radicalization of the theme of participatory democracy which is advocated in a
variety of fields and domains of social life. Within the mode of theory, the
democratic turn involves a shift toward more multiperspectival theorizing that
respects a variety of sometimes conflicting perspectives rather than, as in
modern theory, seeking the one perspective of objective truth or absolute
knowledge. In opposition to discourses of the unity of absolute truth,
postmodern micropolitics stresses difference, plurality, conflict, and respect
for the other.

Yet it would be a mistake to draw
too sharp a distinction between the modern and postmodern paradigms and to
vilify the modern as the site of all that is repressive and retrograde, and the
postmodern as the mode of progressiveness and emancipation. There are regressive
and progressive aspects in both the modern and postmodern traditions and we are
claiming that we are currently suspended between two historical epochs ―
the modern and the postmodern ―
each of which has its own theoretical articulations and discourses, narratives,
forms of art and cultural expression, scientific paradigms, politics, and modes
of everyday life. The problem for those of us trying to theorize this great
transformation, this rapid move into a new space, is to think together the
modern and the postmodern, to see the interaction of both in the contemporary
moment and to deploy the resources of both modern and postmodern theory to
illuminate, analyze, and critique this space.

We thus eschew a totalizing and
essentializing assault on postmodern theory and politics as inherently
"regressive," "reactionary," or an "ideology of late-capitalism," and support an
approach that overcomes a radical disjunction between modern and postmodern
approaches to theory and politics.[15] This
project requires a reconstruction of politics drawing on the traditions of
modern politics and the new discourses and trends of a postmodern politics. Such
a politics would overcome the one-sided and non-dialectical squabbles between
advocates of modern and postmodern politics and would provide a more viable and
inclusive politics for the future. Whereas there are obvious problems with a
modern politics that attempts to develop a universal model for all times and all
places irrespective of differences and specificities, there is still the need
for a normative vision and political principles and norms that respect the
rights and discourses of others, that support a politics of alliance and
solidarity which seeks the common and public interests of individuals in a given
society, and that aspires to a higher ground above the special interests of
particular groups.

Thus, modern theories such as
Marxism remain an crucial form of criticism today, providing indispensable
categories to analyze and criticize exploitation, alienation, class struggle,
and capitalist economic and cultural hegemony, none of which have disappeared in
the postmodern world. Indeed, what we are witnessing today on a global level is
the intensification and perfection of capitalist domination in the form of the
mushrooming of transnational corporations which resist regulation and control,
growing levels of economic inequality, increased monopoly control of key
resources and technologies, the revival of child labor and sweatshops, the
privatization of state functions, and major upheavals due to capitalist
reorganization and restructuring. Yet Marxism can no longer rely on the hopes
that the struggles of the industrial proletariat and construction of socialism
will automatically provide liberation or that this scenario is guaranteed by
history. The events of the past decade have shown that certain versions of
orthodox Marxism are flawed and that the Marxian tradition must be rethought and
invented anew to make it relevant to the challenges of the future.[16]

Thus, we should avoid both the
characteristic deficiencies of a modern politics that is grounded in an
excessively universalizing political discourse that occludes differences and
imposes a general dogmatic political schema which is held to be a foundational
and not-to-be questioned arbitrator of political values and decisions. In
addition, we should reject a postmodern identity politics that renounces the
normative project of modern politics, that refuses common and general interests
as intrinsically repressive, and that thus abandons a politics of alliance and
solidarity in favor of the advocacy of one's own special interest group.
Instead, a new politics would mediate the differences between the traditions,
creating new syntheses that would strive for a higher ground based on common
interests, general philosophical principles, and a renunciation of dogmatism and
authoritarianism of whatever sort.

A new postmodern politics would
also overcome the Eurocentrism of modern politics and valorize a diversity of
local political projects and struggles. Although globalization is creating a
more homogenized and shared world, it is doing so unevenly, thus proliferating
difference and heterogeneity at the same time it produces resemblance and
homogeneity. New syntheses of the global and the local, new hybridities, and an
increased diaspora of many peoples and cultures is creating a novel situation in
which modernization processes are reaching the far corners of the world and a
postmodern global culture is found everywhere at the same time that new
syntheses of the modern, postmodern, and premodern are generating differences
and heterogeneity.[17] Thus,
to the extent that modernization processes now include postmodernization
processes, such that NAFTA, GATT, and the World Bank are bringing the cultures
and technologies of developed postindustrial societies to developing societies,
these societies must confront not only rapacious capital, repressive state
control, and the exploitation of labor, but also mass media, cultural
spectacles, computer technologies, new cultural identities, and so on.

In this situation, a postmodern
politics must learn to be at once local, national, and global, depending on
specific territorial conditions and problems. While sometimes only local
struggles are viable, a new politics must also learn how to go beyond the local
to the national and even global levels, requiring new forms of struggle and
alliance against the growing power of transnational capitalism, the superstates
that remain the dominant political forces, and the rapidly expanding culture
industries of contemporary technocapitalism. Such new struggles and alliances
are emerging already, as evident in the dramatic Seattle upheavals in December,
1999.

Rethinking politics in the present
conflicted and complex configurations of both novel and established relations of
power and domination thus requires thinking through the complex ways in which
the global and the local are interconnected. Theorizing the configurations of
the global and the local also requires developing new multidimensional
strategies ranging from the macro to the micro, the national to the local, in
order to intervene in a wide range of contemporary and emerging problems and
struggles. To the slogan, "Think globally, act locally," we may thus add the
slogan, "Think locally, act globally." From this perspective, problems
concerning global environmental problems, the development of a global
information superhighway, and the need for new global forums for discussing and
resolving the seemingly intransigent problems of war and peace, poverty and
inequality, and overcoming divisions between the haves and the have-nots may
produce new conceptions of global citizenship and new challenges for global
intellectuals and activists.

Yet it is impossible to predict
what forms a future postmodern politics will take. Such a politics is open and
evolving, and will itself develop in response to changing and perhaps surprising
conditions. Thus, it is impossible to sketch out the full parameters of a
postmodern politics as the project is relatively new and open to further and
unpredictable developments. In this novel and challenging conjuncture, the old
modern and new postmodern politics both seem one-sided. Power resides in macro
and micro institutions; it is more complex than ever with new
configurations of global, national, regional, and more properly local forces and
relations of power, generating new conflicts and sites of struggle, ranging from
debates over "the new world order" ―or
disorder as it may appear to many―
to struggles over local control of schools or the environment. This situation
thus requires fresh thinking and politics as we move into the new millennium.

Which Road Ahead?

"Our tragedy lies in the
richness of the available alternatives, and in the fact that so few of them
are ever seriously explored. Tom Athanasiou

"Human history becomes more and
more a race between education and catastrophe." H.G. Wells

Our contemporary situation thus
finds us between the modern and the postmodern, the old and the new, tradition
and the contemporary, the global and the local, the universal and the
particular, and any number of other competing matrixes. Such a complex situation
produces feelings of vertigo, anxiety, and panic, and contemporary theory, art,
politics and everyday life exhibit signs of all of these symptoms. To deal with
these tensions, we need to develop new syntheses of modern and postmodern theory
and politics to negotiate the novelties and intricacies of our current era.

Indeed, both modern and postmodern
positions have strengths and limitations, and we should seek a creative
combination of the best elements of each. Thus, we should combine modern notions
of solidarity, alliances, consensus, universal rights, macropolitics and
institutional struggle with postmodern notions of difference, plurality,
multiperspectivalism, identity, and micropolitics. The task today is to
construct what Hegel called a "differentiated unity," where the various threads
of historical development come together in a rich and mediated way. The abstract
unity of the Enlightenment, as expressed in the discourse of rights or human
nature, produced a false unity that masked and suppressed differences and
privileged certain groups at the expense of others. The postmodern turn,
conversely, has produced in its extreme forms warring fragments of difference,
exploding any possible context for human community. This was perhaps a necessary
development in order to construct needed differences, but it is now equally
necessary to reconstruct a new social whole, a progressive community in
consensus over basic values and goals, a solidarity that is richly mediated with
differences that are articulated without being annulled.

Thus, one of the main dramas of our
time will be which road we choose to travel into the future, the road that
leads, in Martin Luther King's phrasing, to community, or the one that verges
toward chaos. Similarly, will we take the course that leads to war or the one
that brings peace? The one that establishes social justice, or ever grosser
forms of inequality and poverty? Will we stay on the same modern path of
irrational growth and development, of the further expansion of a global
capitalist economy (the world of NAFTA and GATT) that has generated seeming
permanent economic, of social, and environmental crisis, or will we create a
sustainable society that lives in balance with the natural world? Will we chart
a whole new postmodern path, blind to the progressive heritage of the past, with
all its attendant snares and dangers? Or will we stake out an alternative route,
radicalizing the traditions of modern Enlightenment and democracy, guided by the
vision of a future that is just, egalitarian, participatory, ecological,
healthy, happy, and sane? The future will depend on what choices we make, hence
we must intelligently and decisively develop a new politics for the future. In
this way, we can begin to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to
the challenges of the coming millennium.

Hence, critical reflection on the
pathologies and illusions of the modern adventure and their continuation in the
present is an important part of the postmodern adventure. A shift in mindset
consequently should be informed by a new awareness of limits, contingency, and
unpredictability, along with nonhierarchical thinking. This shift also requires
repudiation of the modern will to power over society and nature, revulsion
toward arrogant Westerncentric humanism, disenchantment with a solely
disenchanting worldview, and renunciation of the fantasy of control and the
belief in the technofix for critical social and ecological problems. Where the
modern adventure was predicated on the values of control, endless growth,
mastery of nature, and a cornucopian world of limitless resources, a key aspect
of the postmodern adventure is the systematic dismantling of this worldview and
the reconstruction of the best aspects of modernity ―
humanism, individuality, enlightened reason, democracy, rights, and
solidarities, tempered by reverence for nature, respect for all life,
sustainability, and ecological balance.

[1]
For analysis of transformations in theory, politics, culture, science,
and technology, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (1991) Postmodern
Theory: Critical Interrogations. London and New York: MacMillan and
Guilford Press, and (1997) The Postmodern Turn. New York:
Guilford Press.

[2] Few
discussions link the transformations to both wide-ranging scientific and
technological revolutions and the global restructuring of
capitalism. Many discourses of the postmodern largely make shifts in
technology responsible for the rupture with modernity, as in Baudrillard
(1983a and 1993) who neglects the significance of the reorganization of
the economy. While Jameson (1984 and 1991), Harvey (1989), and others
relate postmodern culture to transformations of capitalism, they tend to
downplay the roles of scientific and technological revolution. Others,
like Lyotard (1984), interpret the "postmodern condition" largely
through mutations of discourse and culture. We argue that if notions of
postmodernity, or a postmodern condition, are to have any force, they
must receive a socio-historical grounding in analysis of the conjuncture
of scientific and technological revolution and the global restructuring
of capitalism.

[10]Rudolph Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern
Europe. London: New Left Books, 1978.

[11]See Best and Kellner 1991 for our discussion
of the need to overcome the antitheses between modern macro politics and
postmodern micropolitics and how both perspectives can be deployed in a
more inclusive politics of the future. In Chapter 8 of Postmodern
Theory, we suggest how a combination of micro and macropolitics were
combined in the struggles against state communism in 1989, thus putting
in question theories that would